Comments by "k98killer" (@k98killer) on "ClearValue Tax" channel.

  1. That's a bet I'll take. I wager $0 that we'll get $0.
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  2. ​ @LeoImar  I hope you're just trolling.
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  3. I can print a multi-quadrillion dollar economy in an Excel spreadsheet. The math works, but I don't think anyone will accept it as a medium of exchange.
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  4. That is not the melt value of the metal, but the unit cost to produce each penny, including all labor and machining costs.
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  5. Less than 1/3 of Treasury debt is held by foreigners. The lower it goes, the weaker the dollar will become, but it isn't likely to becone a monetary crisis.
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  6. "Silver protects you from inflation" is a funny statement in that it has not been true in my experience over the past decade. It's more like "you might nominally recoup your cost basis after 10 years, yayy".
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  7. Egg price shock is, by definition, not inflation. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon; a price shock due to shortages is not a monetary phenomenon.
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  8. Brian, you heard about Bessent being the rumored replacement for Powell? I expect YCC if he gets chosen and confirmed.
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  9. This looks like it is slightly better than BIL and MINT but basically the same concept.
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  10. The confusion between inflation and CPI is a pet peeve. Inflation is the expansion of the circulating stock of money and credit in excess of the expansion of demand for money due to increased economic activity: if the circulating money supply doubles but economic activity increases sufficiently to double the demand for money, there will not be any inflation. CPI, on the other hand, is an attempt to approximate changes in prices across a basket of goods and services as a replacement for an accurate measure of inflation, which would be primarily monetary.
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  11. One potential for federal debt monetization will be the expansion of crypto dollar/stable coin use. Issuers of stable coins typically buy Treasury bills as their primary reserve asset, so expanding the demand for them, perhaps by the federal government using them to make some payments, could result in further debt monetization. As long as the monetization outpaces the debt servicing cost and budget deficit, it is viable. However, since the interest would accrue to an entity that does not remit profits to the Treasury the way the Fed does (during normal times when it isn't bankrupt), they'll only get a slight discount in the form of income taxes on that interest.
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  12. The only way an ERS would make sense is if the total number of employees and the total operational cost of the ERS and CBP combined are lower than the current number of employees and operational cost of the CBP.
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  13. "Rome is burning. We should debase our currency before the fire goes out. It's free heat."
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  14. Broad money is created when banks issue deposits against their assets. Transfers between banks use accounts at the Federal Reserve or a clearing house on a net basis. The money printed by the Fed is only useful to banks for this net settlement or as an interest-bearing account to replace Treasury bonds. When the Treasury borrows and spends, the associated economic activity in the private sector can lead to a higher demand for money, so banks issue deposits in excess of the deficit expenditure, which is analogous to the Keynesian multiplier. Banks can also issue deposits to buy Treasury bonds from the non-bank private sector, which was the original form of QE before the Fed was created; in doing so, Treasury debt becomes private sector money through banks. If the Fed directly monetizes the debt, the subsequent transfers into the private sector create more bank deposits backed by Fed account balances rather than directly backed by Treasury bonds. The net effect of deficit spending is thus an expansion of M2. If the government balanced its budget and ran a surplus, there would be some contraction in associated private sector activity, but this would not guarantee a reduction in M2 greater than the reduction in outstanding debt. As long as the private sector is sufficiently active and productive, demand for money will be high enough that banks will not contract and will instead choose other assets to back their deposit liabilities. The complication here is in regulations and VAR models that might interfere with this process. I believe this is why Bessent is pushing for bank deregulation: to make sure banks are not impeded by regulations from supporting economic expansion in excess of federal debt expansion and cushion the private sector effects of changes in government expenditures.
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  15. I like the all-weather/dragon portfolio approach: 4-5 uncorrelated categories, each diversified appropriately. Also, dollar cost average.
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  16. ​ @quattrocity9620  never heard of this before. I'll look into it. Thanks for the heads-up.
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  17. "Ms. Blunt" is a really great name for a politician on an oversight committee.
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  18. Monetary debasement is the inevitable conclusion.
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  19. Creating a special one-time non-refundable tax credit for the next tax year using the previous year of discretionary expenditure reductions to determine the value stands a much better chance of passing imo. It is a much cleaner structure, and it requires Congress to actually cut spending by the amount DOGE saves before it takes effect. If this became a structural thing, Representatives would get a lot of grassroots pressure to keep the cuts coming so that the tax burden keeps lightening.
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  20. 1. Discretionary spending for affected agencies decreases by at least 80% of DOGE savings for that agency, leaving a bit of wiggle room for DOGE errors. 2. Total tax credit value will equal the amount of discretionary budget decrease multiplied by 0.2. 3. Tax credit value per tax payer becomes that total divided by the number of tax payers for the previous tax year. 4. Repeat this process every year.
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  21. The Fed "remains agile", yet they have accumulated losses in excess of 6 times their capital, impairing their liabilities by 3%. "Agile".
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  22. The effects of tariffs will be redistributive and net deflationary: insofar as the prices for consumer products are raised, and consumers must spend more upon them, they will spend that amount less on other things; and the taxes collected by the feds would otherwise be spent to purchase goods and services.
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  23. "MAGA accounts" are "Money Accounts for Growth and Advancement" that are basically savings accounts which accrue tax-free interest income, apparently.
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  24. Bitcoin will probably be the fastest horse in the great melt-up race, but doing something like a dragon portfolio makes a lot of sense.
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  25. I'm on Team Paul: both Ron and Rand are better teammates than Musk of Trump.
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  26. The BLS has a history of over reporting new jobs and then revising those reports downwards a few months later.
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  27. No matter how many times people say "Tier 1 Asset", and no matter how many times I read Basel III regulations, there literally never exists a such thing as a "Tier 1 Asset". The bit about making loans based upon gold seems like a big misunderstanding, but perhaps they did change something at the beginning of this month that I didn't see when I read the rules last month, or last year, or the year before that -- my guess based upon my experience thus far is that it is another contrived fantasy of an illiterate goldbug.
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  28. 🤡🌎🇺🇸
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  29. Supposedly, new banking regulations will allow banks to hold TSYs as reserves without requiring they put them in the HTM bucket or reserve any capital against them because the Fed now has an emergency lending program to lend to member banks against TSYs at par during liquidity crises. However, so far the only similar regulations are about stable coin issuance, which might be the route they take. I think this will be an inevitable development sometime this year or next, because the only way to extend and pretend is with monetary debasement.
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  30. @blackballoon4u  nothing Trump does to "ensure fair trade" is going to reduce the federal debt. DOGE has so far saved $140 billion; if it can keep up this pace for the rest of the year, it will save about $700 billion, but this is a highly questionable projection. Moreover, DOGE savings are supposed to make the government more efficient -- actually cutting the budget requires Congress. The Republicans in Congress passed a spending bill that had substantially no cuts, which will result in a $2T deficit. The only real solution is to cut spending and reform entitlements, and only Congress can do that, and Congress is the least functional branch of government, so I doubt it will happen.
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  31. I am glad that the President of the United States explained it -- after all, he has the best words.
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  32. Lower interest rates will be only for the government. Everyone else will be starved of credit.
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  33. This is literally the opposite of everything George Gammon just published. That dude has lost the plot.
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  34. I don't think that's a "goal" in some conspiratorial sense anymore than you using a bank account is caused by some conspiracy. Shit just happens. Human life is incalculably messy.
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  35.  @Lou-eye  Judges 19
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  36. Have you seen David Schweikert's recent presentation to Congress? Closing the carried interest loophole will generate enough additional tax revenue to replace a few hours worth of borrowing by the federal government.
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  37. The industrial utility of silver is a mark against its monetary utility. As such, it has been progressively demonetized. Imagine saying that seashells have been money for millennia as an argument for stacking seashells. Neither will ever reachieve their former monetary significance because better moneys exist.
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  38. I looked at that Kitco article, and it is the same regurgitated nonsense that has been spread across the Internet for years. No, Basel III does not allow banks to hold physical gold as a "Tier 1 asset" -- there is no such thing as a "Tier 1 asset" to begin with, and CET1 (Common Equity Tier 1) capital has nothing to do with gold. Moreover, the claim that physical gold will be allowed as a reserve on par with central bank liabilities and government bonds is an outright lie.
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  39. The article's claim that Basel III treats physical gold as "risk free" is also a lie. Basel III very clearly gives gold a risk weighting based upon commodity market risk which is much higher than the risk weighting for government bonds.
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  40. That Truth Social post by the Trumby has a classic format.
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  41. Idk if the stock market is anticipating rate cuts at the Fed or just reacting to rate cuts abroad and the dropping of the foreigner dividend tax from the Big Beautiful Bill. Remember that our net investment position is highly negative -- foreigners comprise a significant portion of our capital market activity.
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  42. I think they have more gold than they should. I think they took a bunch of gold during the wars in the middle east. The real scandal will be how we have more than we should and were not as noble in our wars of conquest than we pretended.
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  43. Monetary policy is broken when the issuer of base money, the Treasury, is issuing without end. The Fed increasing interest rates causes larger federal deficits, which are inflationary; bank NIMs and thus profits increase, leading to expansion of bank capital through retained earnings and thus enabling them to lend more, which is also inflationary. Raising interest rates only fights CPI when it results in 1) a shift in bank lending preferences from financing consumption to financing production and 2) a shift in broader market participant preferences from spending to saving. The normal model assumes both outcomes, but they are not guaranteed. The normal model also confuses inflation, which is an expansion of circulating money and credit, with CPI.
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